PART ONE

2. CHAPTER II

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning,
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views
of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that
their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are
suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them
know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--
where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other
forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds
that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps
sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes
dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is
dreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even their
experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the
effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own
country and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be
more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread
hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even
from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was
nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out
on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any
relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once
been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed
walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a
subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then
another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at
once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the
pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and
swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner;
the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given
out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had
been the channel of divine influences to Marner--they were the
fostering home of his religious emotions--they were Christianity
and God's kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his
hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows
nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap
towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.